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Cud Comics

Dark Horse Comics, 1995-'98

In 1994, eager to capture some of that LaBan magic, Dark Horse Comics lured me away from Fantagraphics with promises of fatter advances, bigger sales and a plush office suite. The series I did with them, Cud Comics, had almost the same name as the Fantagraphics series, but was otherwise very different. Really, it should've been called "Eno and Plum" since every issue contained several stories about those characters, a "slacker"('90s term)couple living in the city. The set up was similar to Unsupervised Existence, but Eno and Plum were much more overtly satirical and comic-strippy. Cud Comics contained a lot of '90s-style postmodernism--the Eno and Plum stories owed a lot to Archie Comics(an old obsession), though their cat was a steal from Gilbert Shelton. Eno was a lazy Gen-X stereotype interested chiefly in watching cable TV, while his girlfriend Plum was more of an active go-getter,though her choices of associates was questionable. Other major characters included Plum's dad, Seymour Riverpeace, a wealthy aging hippy with a jones for dope, Catherine, Plum's unhappily-single girlfriend, and Edgar Reamington, a sort of yuppie Reggie who was always trying to steal away Plum. There were also random side-stories in Cud Comics, but less of them than in Cud.
Cud Comics was my "slickest" comic book series, an attempt to creat a sort of Generation X Freak Brothers. The attempt may have been misguided--sales for this book actually weren't much better than the previous one--but it was what I honestly wanted to do at the time. Most of the stories in the first four books were collected in a 1997 paperback called Eno and Plum; the others remain out of print. The longer story posted here, "The Haunted Shirt", is one of those later ones and, in my opinion, one of the best.